Leading Article: Rules for MPs, gay or straight

'IT'S OK to be a minister and gay, says PM': thus the Sun's front page yesterday in a story that baffled No 10 Downing Street. It followed the weekend resignation of a junior Tory whip, Michael Brown, after newspaper claims that he had had a homosexual relationship with a 20-year-old man. As so often when the question of homosexuality arises, separate issues seemed to be becoming confused.

The Sun went on to quote a 'senior Government source' as saying: 'The days when a minister could lose his job simply for being gay are gone. There is no more reason why a single male MP should not have boyfriends than girlfriends.' Sound thinking, but surely true for many years. At least one member of Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet was assumed to be homosexual. Mr Brown's problem lies not in his sexuality but in having notionally broken the law: the recently agreed reduction in the age of consent for male homosexuals from 21 to 18 is not yet in effect.

Unfortunately for MPs, the public expects those who act as legislators not to break the laws that Parliament passes, however obsolete and unfair they may appear. That applies equally to heterosexual MPs. If one of them were found to be having a relationship with a girl of 15, he would probably be in more serious trouble than Mr Brown, who is receiving strong support from his constituency association. A happily married man caught breaking the law by smoking cannabis would also be at risk.

For all that, homosexual MPs undoubtedly have to be particularly careful over how they behave. They may even feel obliged to affect a bogus heterosexuality. Constituency selection committees, whether or not themselves prejudiced, often feel safer choosing a candidate who conforms to the public ideal of being part of a happy, heterosexual marriage or relationship, preferably with a child or two as supporting evidence. There have even been reports of bachelor MPs being put under pressure to marry.

There are grounds for the bourgeois view that homosexuals are under less pressure - from spouses, from children and from the dire financial effects of divorce - than married couples to conform to accepted social mores. Yet the recent cases of the Tory MPs Tim Yeo, Steven Norris, Stephen Milligan and Hartley Booth show that heterosexuality can cause plenty of trouble. What matters, as the only MP to have 'come out', Labour's widely admired Chris Smith, has commented, is not whether someone is straight or gay, bachelor or married, but how good they are as an MP or minister.